To identify where the quality research activity has been and is carried out in Korea, and to examine to what extents Korean medical colleges play leading roles in the production of international research papers, we investigated the publication productivity of Korean medical colleges and their medical departments as measured by the number of papers published in foreign journals indexed in MEDLINE. The 12-year period from 1988 to 1999 is covered. A total of 4,881 papers is published in MEDLINE foreign journals by the researchers in Korean medical colleges during the period. The production of MEDLINE papers are concentrated in a few universities. More than 60% of MEDLINE foreign journal papers is published by top five universities 25% by Seoul National University, and 15% by Yonsei University. The newly established medical colleges at the University of Ulsan and Sungkyunkwan University produced outstanding numbers of papers in less than ten years. Radiology has led the internationalization of Korean medical papers. It was the most productive specialty identified in this study. The productivity of Internal medicine is on the rise from the mid-1990s, and the field began to produce the most number of papers since then.